A closer look at Gulf of Maine warming

On a frigid February Friday, when I should otherwise be in Hawaii at the Ocean Sciences meeting, there is one substitution for staying warm: looking at Gulf of Maine temperature trends. This blog is a closer look at the Gulf of Maine warming that Andy described in an earlier post (and a still earlier post).

A closer look shows that the warming over the past 30 years (about .3 deg C per year) is not uniform across the gulf, or throughout the year. The plot shows the warming trend for each month across the gulf. The red regions in the upper left sub plot, for example, show areas where January temperatures have warmed over the past 30 years. The next sub-plot shows February and so on. Blue indicates a cooling trend. The twelve sub plots are for the twelve months.

The Bay of Fundy is consistently warming, and the autumn is generally warmer now than in the 1980s. But there is some nuance here. February, for example, has been getting cooler.

By contrast, here is the same plot looking at the past 10 years (same color scale):

This represents a gulf-wide 2-3 degree warming over the past 10 years. This histogram summarizes the data, similar to Andy's last post.

Although these plots show warming trends, they don't produce warming themselves, and my fingers are starting to freeze up. This may be the last thing I type today.